Island Profile: Laurie Fanelli, seeing things through for her community
Laurie Fanelli makes a habit of ascribing anything she accomplishes to someone else.
Like her assertion that she got the leadership skills and compassion that made her the town’s director of Senior Services from her mother, Loretta Gillman. Laurie has a story to illustrate the point. “In my family, it was known that if you came to the New York area [the family lived in Rutherford, N.J.] you’d call Loretta and she’d take care of you.”
Laurie’s uncle was once on a trip to Costa Rica, made friends with a basketball coach named José, and gave him Loretta’s number. Loretta got a call from José and gladly offered to put him up when he visited New York over the holidays. But when the Gillman family went to Newark airport to meet their visitor (with a sign that said “José”) he had an entire basketball team with him. Their house was over capacity, but Loretta was able to find friends and neighbors to house the (very tall) team, and the Gillmans had the whole long-legged crew for Christmas dinner.
Laurie’s compassionate bent led her to nursing as a profession. At 20, she graduated in 1961 from the Christ Hospital School of Nursing and began working there. One day, she heard about a 2-year-old child who needed help. The child’s father was overseas, and her mother was a North Korean medical student doing her residency at Christ Hospital.
“Poor little Sissy — her name was actually Maryann — was alone in her apartment with an aide,” Laurie said. “Her mother didn’t know what to do with her.”
When Laurie went home and told her parents, they took Sissy in and raised her as their own. Sissy lived with the Gillmans for 15 years with weekend visits from her natural mother. Today, Laurie says, Sissy is a family court judge, living in Seattle, married and with two children of her own. Laurie regards her as a sister.
In the early 1960s, at the invitation of a friend who wanted to help her get over a break-up, Laurie went on an 18-day cruise from New York to Venezuela. She volunteered one day to take a little boy up to the bridge to meet the captain, while the boy’s parents went to have a drink in the bar. She and the little boy met the ship’s officers, including Joe Fanelli, a handsome recent graduate of the Merchant Marine Academy, where Laurie’s brother had also studied. Joe was a mate on the United States, docked in New York, and when the cruise returned to New York, they continued to see each other and married in 1966.
Their three children are Cristina, Marissa and Julie. Cristina lives in Mendham, N.J., is married to Tim Babits, and works as a teacher in elementary education. Marissa Fanelli lives on Shelter Island, works at The Islander, and has a 14-year-old son Charlie who attends the Shelter Island School. Julie, also an Islander, is married to Joe Denny; their daughter Vivian is 8 and attends the Hayground School where Julie teaches.
The story of how the Fanelli family found Shelter Island is a familiar one. In 1967, Laurie and Joe were invited out by friends, and immediately fell in love with the Island. Weekend stays at inns and with friends followed, and they bought a sailboat and lived on it for a while. In the early 1970s, they bought a tiny house, and a few years later built a bigger one in Shorewood. Cristina, Marissa and Julie worked every summer, washing dishes at the Inn Between, teaching swimming, and making sandwiches at the Island Boatyard, where they were known as “the Deli Fanellis.”
In 1980, Joe was diagnosed with a life-threatening bone marrow condition with an uncertain prognosis and no cure. Most people with that type of bone marrow condition died within four years of diagnosis.
Joe had started a successful business in ship brokerage that had supported the family for many years, but with the future uncertain, they decided Laurie needed more education, so she got a master’s degree in Nursing Education at NYU, and after certification began working as a nurse practitioner. Joe worked up until three days before he died in 1996 — 16 years after his diagnosis.
In those years, Laurie said, they squeezed in a lot of living. “We traveled and the girls got through school,” she said, “but he missed some great grandkids.”
Over the years, Laurie’s work took her to the front lines of health care. She admits she gravitated to the most challenging assignments “I became the expert on the hard cases,” she said.
In the early 90s, while working as a visiting nurse in Newark, she went on assignment in the company of armed guards, and was once guided through the halls and stairwells of a bullet-hole-riddled building by flashlight and met a couple of intimidating but helpful men who got onto the elevator with her and then suggested she’d better walk. She later learned they were undercover policemen. Parking was possible, but car theft was rampant. “I lost five cars,” she remembered. “After the fifth, Joe said, ‘I think it’s time to get out of Newark.’”
She was living a kind of split life; changing dressings, and cleaning wounds for elderly, impoverished and often bereaved homebound patients during the week, and heading to Shelter Island on the weekend.
From 1999 to 2006, she worked at Village Center for Care, an AIDS program, at Rivington House in the Village. “There was treatment, but people were dying so fast,” she said. “Too many funerals. It was horrible.”
In 2015, she retired, and a few months later ran into Chris Lewis, a friend and former Town Council member, who encouraged her to take on another tough assignment — to rejuvenate Shelter Island’s Senior Center.
“I thought, I know I can do this,” she said. “I’ve always tried to go toward something that spooked me or something that I didn’t know. I’m the idiot who loves to get lost. My husband used to say, ‘You and your shortcuts.’ It’s even true in this job.”
Laurie has made a lot of changes at the Senior Center, with new staff and new initiatives. While keeping vital programs running smoothly, she added a program to administer flu shots, which is expanding to offer a variety of immunizations. This year, all 300 spots for flu shots filled quickly. In the first weeks of the COVID-19 emergency, the Senior Center harnessed a pool of over 80 volunteers to help quarantined and homebound citizens get mail, supplies and food.
She has shown leadership on the question of safe drinking water, the lack of well-testing, and the threats to the quality and quantity of water in Shelter Island’s sole aquifer.
In the early days of the pandemic, Laurie took advantage of the full-time presence of an array of talented health professionals to establish the Health and Wellness Alliance to advise and educate the community. The organization includes three social workers; Lucille Buergers, Nancy Green and Bonnie Berman; psychiatrist Ryan Sultan; and clinical psychologist Trisha Gallagher. Jessica Colas and Laurie, both psychiatric nurse practitioners, round out the team.
These days she’s focusing on issues related to loss and loneliness, such as hoarding and bereavement, problems that cause real pain and suffering. “There just are not the services available over here,” she said. “If I was in New York and concerned about a hoarding situation, a social worker would go out, and if we were still concerned, we’d call Adult Protective Services. They’d call on a team to make an assessment. We might get an aide in to get the place cleaned up and to build trust so we could then work on issues.”
But she refuses to let the current lack of services east of Riverhead for these kinds of problems discourage her. “We don’t have it,” she said. “We need it. I will get this. ”
Lightning round
What do you always have with you? I used to wear a figa, a golden hand charm from Brazil.
Favorite place on Shelter Island? The beach in Shorewood. It’s full of memories.
When was the last time you were elated? Two weeks ago, when our mental health group had a gathering at Crab Creek Beach.
What exasperates you? Stupid questions.
Favorite movie or book? ‘Toms River,’ by Dan Fagin. It’s about what happened when a town polluted their aquifer.
Favorite food? Vanessa’s Dumplings in New York.
Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Florence Nightingale.
Most respected elected official? Rudolph Giuliani.
